Broadcast has an almost century long tradition in radio. Even with TV, the history goes back to 1930's. Broadcasting has been successful throughout the world in bringing both entertainment and information to mass audiences.
The latest step in broadcasting is the digitalization of both radio and TV. Digital radio has not gained much acceptance on the market. However, many hope that digital TV will bring new benefits and services to the consumer and, as a result, generate new revenue streams for the broadcasting industry. The basic concept of the TV service itself has, however, not changed much. Rather, the TV lives on as before even if it has become digital.
In later half of 1990's we saw the boom of the Internet. A whole set of new services and content became available to the consumers during a short, revolutionary and hype intense period. That period introduced e-commerce, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Portals, eyeballs game, dotcom companies and even the new economy. The developments in both access technologies (e.g. ADSL) and coding technologies (e.g. MPEG4 streaming) have made it possible to bring rich media content like video content to homes via the Internet. Despite of these technology and market breakthroughs media houses have been reluctant to distribute their content via the Internet due to its “free-of-charge” nature and the direct threat of piracy. Neither has Internet been able to challenge the role of traditional media as the primary advertisement platform despite its great popularity.
Broadcast provides the receiver device with huge amount of information. The receiver device needs to obtain linking and guidance information from broadcast information for obtaining services and/or portions of the service which can be indicated in the linking and guidance information. The linking and guidance information is typically contained in Service Information (SI) indicating and guiding the discovery of the services. The SI indicates various services of at least one broadcast network.
Latest appliances of broadcast have raised a need for power consumption consideration in the receiver, and some efforts for reducing power consumption in the receiver have been made. However, although these efforts are consistent with the SI, the receiver and the system do not benefit enough. Moreover, they are blind in respect of the broadcasting. In this case the receiver cannot detect, which of the streams carried within a multiplex are adapted to fit the power reduction principles and, possibly, which are not.
In view of various inherent limitations of broadcasting, it would be desirable to avoid or mitigate these and other problems associated with prior art systems. Thus, there is a need for identifying parts of broadband transmission in respect of the power consumption principles.